Hello, 

Last month, amidst rising allegations of irregularities and fraud, the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar emphatically invoked the privacy of women to dodge sharing CCTV footage with opposition parties. Should the Election Commission share CCTV videos of anyone's mother, daughter-in-law, sister, or of anyone else?, he asked. 

Gyanesh Kumar’s comments piqued our interest and we set about digging. We found that while the ECI will happily invoke privacy to dodge public accountability, it has been sharing crucial voter information with the government of Telangana. On the basis of which, Telangana created a line of facial recognition algorithms starting with a pension verification and dispensation tool launched in 2019. ECI’s part in creating this database used to train these algorithms is in clear contradiction with its role as a constitutional body. Yet, it did so anyway. 

This is another notch in a growing list of contradictions and obfuscations by the ECI that have been uncovered by The Collective in recent months.

In this case, the Telangana government also gave a Hyderabad based private firm, Posidex Technologies Private Limited access to this crucial voter data. While on the outset the data was collected from voters to be used solely for election purposes.

Read my latest report on how the Election Commission gave access to voter data, including photos, to a state government and private companies 

You can read all our reports on the recent voter roll revisions, in our Electoral Roll Project

We have doggedly kept a watch on ECI from the get go, since they announced their controversial revision of the voter rolls. But the Indian government’s tax notice has put a serious strain on our finances. Nevertheless our small newsroom has kept going to keep tabs on our democratic process.
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Warm Regards,
Ayushi Kar
Reporter
The Reporters’ Collective.